Same Constellation, different Star
Stars is yet another product of the Eastern Canadian ‘Soft Revolution’ that produced BSS, The Arcade Fire
John Kendle



Torquil Campbell’s band Stars has been touring to promote Set Yourself on Fire since the album was released in October 2004.

Given the disc’s ever-burgeoning popularity, Stars will likely be on the road until this summer. So what has Campbell been doing with himself since Stars wrapped up its 2005 schedule with a six-night Toronto stand in mid-December?

Nothing much. Just making an album with his other band, Memphis.

“Really, it’s relaxing to do this,” the singer/songwriter says from his home in Vancouver’s West End. Campbell sounds genuinely upbeat as he talks about working with Chris Dumont, his partner in the avant-pop duo that has released two full albums. For Campbell, making music is hardly a job at all.

“Doing music is almost like a drug to me. I’m so enslaved to it that when I’m not doing I want to be doing it,” he says.

“I never get sick of playing or making music, just the rigamarole that goes around it. And I love working with just the two of us on this project as much as I love working with Stars. Where Stars is like a drinking band, Memphis is like a drug band. Stars’ music is very direct and open, whereas Memphis is obtuse and strange.

“Each musical relationship is unique — like going out with a certain friend because you know the energy is going to be a certain way.”

For the past 15 months or so, much of Campbell’s energy has been directed to working with his friends in Stars.

Created in the winter of 2003-’04 at a rented cabin in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the expansive, emotional soundscape of Set Yourself on Fire has become the latest success of Canada’s close-knit indie music community.

Stars shares its Montreal home base (Campbell now lives in Vancouver because his actress wife works in the West Coast city) with last year’s breakthrough band of the moment, The Arcade Fire. And Stars members Amy Millan (vocals/guitar), Evan Cranley (bass/trombone) and Chris Seligman (keyboards/programming) are also part of the extended circle that makes up Broken Social Scene, the Toronto project which seems to have been the launching pad for so many.

Like Feist and Metric before them, the Stars folk have found audiences of their own in Canada, in the U.S. (where the album was released in March 2005), in Japan and in Europe in the past year.

Buzz for the group is now such that The O.C., the music-friendly U.S. teen drama, has featured three of the band’s tunes. Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe even told Entertainment Weekly’s 2005 year-end issue that Stars was his favourite new band.

Such accolades are nice, Campbell acknowledges, but they really are the means to an end for a 33-year-old who has been acting and making music since he was a kid.

“I never thought that me and Chris (Seligman, a friend since Campbell was eight) could create something that could become our jobs, our careers and our lives,” he says.

“So all the growth of the past year has been a very strange and happy thing. It makes me think that I can make it and achieve all those hopes and dreams that I have had forever.

“But I know what it’s about, too,” he continues. “The power of success is very interesting to see, and it’s interesting to have successfully negotiated ourselves into that aspect of the machine, to have gotten to the point where I can use it to sell my art.”

“So when I read things like (Radcliffe’s comments), I want to write him a letter and say, ‘Dear Daniel, glad you enjoy the stuff. How about sending us $50,000 to help us make another record?’

“It’s kind of funny, really.”

Campbell is certainly not complaining, though.

He comes from an acting family (and will, in fact, be directing his parents in a play in Vancouver later this year), and so knows the hardships of an artistic life. He also knows what it’s like to try and make it as a band. Since the late ’90s, a version of Stars has existed in Toronto, in New York and in Montreal. The band’s debut album, Night Songs, was released in 2001. Three EPs and a second full-length, Heart, followed before Set Yourself… actually caught fire.

With drummer Pat McGee and touring guitarist Steve Ramsay now added to the band’s core quartet, Stars is about to embark on a U.S. tour before heading to Europe for another round of shows.

“Then it’s playtime,” Campbell says.

Except, of course, for the fact that another Stars album will probably be due by mid-2007. But Campbell says he doesn’t feel pressure the way others might. After all, this is a guy who has spent his month off from Stars making another record with a different project.

“I work off a sense of panic and fear,” he says. “The fear of being boring is a motivating factor in my life, so the rules of this life have been laid out for me from the beginning. I always feel pressure to get things done.”

Rest assured, then, that Stars will have a new album finished sooner rather than later. In the meantime there’s a remix project in the works, the Memphis album to finish and a solo alt-country album from Millan to support.

And after that…

“I guess we have to go rent a cabin again,” Campbell says.

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